In public safety investigation when an investigator is reviewing a multimedia file or stream of interest, he/she desires to be supported immediately by alternative evidences from other multimedia files or streams, which were recorded the same time and location and which present additional views or information. In other words, investigators like to be supported in timely manner with “related” multimedia within the database of their agencies as well as with data from external Internet or social networking sites.
Two multimedia files may be related to each other, if snippets of one multimedia file are related to snippets of another, even though they are not entirely identical. (A snippet is defined as a fragment of a multimedia/audio file of a finite length). In discovering related snippets, the first challenge is to discover the audio snippets per pair of multimedia files in a database in an optimal way. Given an audio snippet, there exist many algorithms to find duplicates of the audio snippet within a larger media file or multiple media files; however most of these systems attempt to find an exact match of the audio snippet. In a database, multimedia files may be recorded with different type of cameras, e.g., surveillance camera, smart phone, handhold video recorder, etc. Each camera may record an event of interest with different background noises, so a snippet of interest may not exactly match among recordings. Additionally, because recording devices may be located in different places, different attenuations and audio path characteristics may exist among each camera's recordings of the event of interest.
It would be beneficial to have a system for automatically and quickly identifying an audio snippet in a known media file, which is related to an audio snippet of a media file in a database in order to correlate the known media file to the media file in a database. Such a system must take into account the different environments in which the event of interest was recorded.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required.